You Don’t Need to Be More Resilient – Maybe You Need Less NONSENSE.

I keep hearing the word resilience thrown around at work like it’s some kind of vitamin deficiency.

(check out my last post on resiliency here.)

Low energy? Resilience.
Overwhelmed? Resilience.
Burnt out, under-resourced, stretched thin, and quietly questioning your life choices?
Definitely resilience.

Apparently, if we could all just be a little tougher, grittier, more adaptable, and emotionally bulletproof, everything would be fine.

Respectfully: no.

Resilience Has Become a Convenient Distraction

First – let me be clear – I AM NOT anti-resilience.

Resilience matters. It’s real. It helps us recover, adapt, and keep going when things are genuinely hard.

But lately, “be more resilient” has started to sound a lot like:

• “Please tolerate conditions we have no intention of fixing.”
• “Manage yourself better so the system doesn’t have to change.”
• “If this is hard for you, that’s a “you problem.”

That’s not leadership.
That’s outsourcing responsibility.

Look, when everything requires resilience, something else is broken.

If people need to be resilient all the time, that’s not strength—that’s chronic strain.

Resilience is meant to be activated occasionally, not worn like a permanent brace just to get through the workday.

When organizations praise resilience without addressing:

• unclear priorities
• constant urgency
• under-staffing
• emotional whiplash
• high expectations with low support

they’re not building strong teams.

They’re normalizing exhaustion.

Let’s talk about NONSENSE.

Before we ask people to dig deeper, cope harder, or “lean in,” maybe we should look at the nonsense draining them in the first place.

You know the nonsense:

• Meetings that could have been an email (but weren’t)
• Competing priorities with no real trade-offs
• Last-minute emergencies that were entirely predictable
• Vague expectations followed by intense scrutiny
• “High performance” cultures that quietly reward overwork

None of that requires more resilience.
It requires better decisions.

Resilience Is Not a Personality Trait. It’s a Contextual Response.

People don’t lack resilience in a vacuum.

They lose it when:

• they feel unseen
• they feel disposable
• they feel like nothing they do is ever enough

And here’s the part we don’t say out loud often enough:

Most people don’t need to be tougher.
They need to feel supported.

Clarity builds resilience.
Trust builds resilience.
Reasonable boundaries build resilience.

Chaos erodes it.

A radical thought (apparently).

What if instead of asking,

“How do we help our people be more resilient?”

we asked,

“What unnecessary BS are we asking them to absorb?”

What if we removed some of the nonsense before prescribing coping strategies?

What if resilience became something people used, not something they were forced to live inside?

Anyway.

That’s what I’m noticing lately.

Resilience is important.
But it’s not a substitute for good leadership, thoughtful systems, or basic respect for human limits.

If your people are exhausted, the answer probably isn’t another workshop on grit.

It’s less nonsense.

And I will die on this hill.

(Resiliently. But still.)